The Origins of Language

For an awfully long time, hominids lived in hunter-gatherer societies. This highly social way of living is thought to have evolved the origins of language, culminating in our species, Homo sapiens, coming to dominate all others. Was it our language that set us apart?

Before exploring the origins of language, let's frame this story by looking at the origins of humans.

Humans are classified under the genus Homo, of which there are at least seven different species. They all arose from a family called Hominidae - also known as the great apes - which includes humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and a ton of extinct species.

Here's a snapshot of key players and their place in the Hominid family tree.

The Origins of Language in Hunter-Gatherers

Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago and the fossil record shows it wasn't long before groups of hunters were able to bring down large prey animals with spears.

Such feats required not just advanced tool-making, but complex social skills. Cavemen were able to verbally forward plan, strategise and coordinate through common languages.

It's a tentative argument - it's not as if they transferred their language into symbols and annotated their cave paintings. But there are lines of indirect evidence that lead us here.

For example, when humans first stepped onto Australia 45,000 years ago, the native megafauna were doomed, and not just because of the changing climate.

Within a few thousand years, Homo sapiens hunters had used their team-working skills to hunt and help drive almost all large animals to extinction.

These were beasts they had never encountered before: massive marsupial lions, dragon-like lizards, five-metre snakes, and two-tonne wombats.

Nonetheless, coordinated humans reigned supreme.

Similarly, when humans crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska 16,000 years ago, they thrived. They spread through the North American continent by coordinating and hunting mammoths, mastodons, reindeer, horses, camels and sabre-toothed cats.

Like no other species before, Homo sapiens had a special intelligence which enabled them to dominate much fiercer predators than themselves.

Was this special new ability based on complex language? It's certainly believed so. But where's the direct evidence of these linguistics origins?

This seemingly straightforward question puts us in quite a pickle.

Most of our knowledge about ancient human history comes from bits of pottery and statues and networks of small walls excavated by heavily-bearded archaeologists.

So as far as the concrete proof goes, you have to derive any conclusions from written language alone.

The Origins of Language in Agricultural Societies

At least 12,000 years ago*, after all other species of humans had disappeared, Homo sapiens switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanently settled agricultural lifestyles.

(*Archaeologists are still working on this timeline. The discovery of vast archaeological ruins at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey date back to 11,600 years ago, and this extraordinary creation didn't pop up overnight. Nor did the architectural skills and astronomical observations encoded into the rock. Civilised society must have emerged over an unknown period of time prior to this.)

Plant domestication arose independently in four centres around the world, namely in Asia and South America, where the climate was more accommodating after the recent glacial period.

Once humans were tied to their land for plant cultivation and cattle grazing - and could no longer roam in nomadic tribes - society took on entirely new forms.

Tribes grew in population, prompting the creation of law, justice and politics.

People took on specific job roles, allowing them to specialise in a single expert craft.

Trading became a necessity, so each family could eat more than a single crop.

The capacity of human memory is limited. As agricultural societies developed rules for ownership, trading and taxation, written records maintained accounts and resolved disputes.

Our knowledge dies when we die. Details of land ownership were recorded so that valuable property could be retained from generation to generation, surpassing the deaths of individuals.

Evolutionary pressures have adapted our brains to recall lots of botanical, zoological and topographical information. Written language was a tool for recording large amounts of difficult-to-remember mathematical data.

So, it's highly likely that spoken language has existed for hundreds of thousands of years around the camp fire.

However, the oldest direct evidence for language extends back only 5,000 years in the form of scripts to facilitate a rapidly changing way of life.

The Origins of Written Language: Sumerian Scripts

The Sumerians were an ancient civilisation who lived in southern Mesopotamia - present day Iraq - and by 3000 BC had developed their own written script.

They combined two types of signs which they pressed into clay tablets.

The first was a mixture of base-6 and base-10 numeral systems. They had signs for 1, 10, 60, 600, 3,600 and 36,000.

A legacy of the Sumerians you enjoy today is that the day is divided into 24 hours and circles into 360 degrees.

The other Sumerian signs represented animals, land, crops, dates, and people. This underpins the fact that their written language was entirely functional, limited to accounting ledgers. They had no desire to record legends or philosophy or art.

And this is why the oldest recorded language in human history reads: "29,086 measures barley 37 months, Kushim" which might be interpreted as: "A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months, signed Kushim".

Partial Script vs Full Script

While technically a written language, early Sumerian writing was only partial script, meaning it could only convey certain types of factual information.

Sumerians could record trades and property ownership - but they couldn't use it to write love stories or legends.

This contrasts to full script, like modern language, which has the capacity to communicate the full spectrum of human experience.

These symbols are so versatile and abundant that you can use them to mimic spoken language.

The partial script was by design, though. Scholars believe the Sumerians invented their partial script not to mimic spoken language, but to compensate where human memory failed, in order to fuel business and society.

In other words, the earliest known human language arose entirely for the purposes of accounting.

Over time, the Sumerians expanded their partial script into a full script which scholars call cuneiform. By 2500 BC, cuneiform was used to issue decrees, to record oracles, and to write letters.

At the same time, the Egyptians developed their own full script known as hieroglyphics.

Full scripts were also developed in China by 1200 BC and in Central America by 1000 BC.

Partial scripts still play valuable roles in our modern world today. Just like the original Sumerian ledgers, musical notation and quantum physics formulas are so functionally specific that they can't extend beyond their technical means. Nonetheless they perform their narrow-band functions exceedingly well.

On the downside, partial script is not an intuitive way of thinking. You actually have to spend time learning the rules of the script and then adapt your way of thinking to it.

The reverse is true with full script (which reflects spoken language) because our ever-evolving language is shaped by the most common modes of human thought.

This is one reason why Einstein's Theory of Relativity is so special. Being able to think like a physicist is rather rare.